The End of Vandalism (10 page)

“Put Louise on.”

“Louise is asleep,” said Dan Norman. “You’d better call back at a decent hour. And let me give you a word of advice. Hold on. Here she is.”

“Yeah? What, Tiny?”

“Put Louise on the line.”

“This is Louise.”

“Louise?”

“
Yeah?”

“Don’t forget the good side.”

“I won’t. Goodbye.”

“The good side, the fun times.”

“I’ll try not. Goodbye now.”

Tiny shifted the phone to his other ear. “Remember going across the lake in that paddleboat thing? Remember how you thought we were going over the dam? You really laughed. You have to admit that you laughed that time we were at the lake.”

“I may have, Tiny. I don’t remember every moment in my life and whether I laughed or not. If you say I did, it’s possible.”

“Then one of the pedals broke. What a disaster.”

“Tiny, I have to get up in the morning.”

“I’m going to see June.”

“For what?”

“I’m already in Nebraska.”

“Don’t go to June’s, for God’s sakes. June is married. They don’t want to see you.”

“By the way, could you give me their phone number?”

“You’ll just make a fool of yourself.”

“Then at least you would be happy.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“What’s it like, fucking a robot? Does he take much oil?” But she had hung up.

The parking lot was as bright as any day. A man with a twitching eye sat in the back of a van with the doors open. “You look like someone who could use a cup of coffee for the road,” he said. “Better yet, how about a hundred cups of coffee? Or a thousand?”

Tiny bought some speed from the man and glided the Parisienne back onto the highway. His anger left him, replaced by an expanding, chemical patience. Seeing in the rear-view mirror eighteen or twenty trucks bearing down on him, for instance, he showed no concern but only said, “Here come the semis.”

The trucks passed the Parisienne like great ships on water. Many truckers who drive Interstate 80 take pride in their running lights. Strings of yellow and blue score the trailers as if square dances are taking place inside. And the cabs resemble ticket booths, strung with orange beads. Even some mud flaps are electric. Once, on a slight grade, the highway widened to add a slow lane, and trucks appeared on all sides of Tiny, and he seemed to be traveling through a canyon of light. This did not last. The illumination faded and disappeared, like a blinking code, and Tiny drove alone. Then a first-time caller on the radio said that Father Zene Hebert was a fraud. Hebert was not ordained and wouldn’t know a biblical scroll if it hit him on the head. His real name was Herbert Bland or Herbert Grand. He was under indictment in Florida. A lamp by a bridge flared and darkened as Tiny passed. This kind of thing had been happening for years, and Tiny wondered if something in his body chemistry was putting out the lights.

His car broke down the next morning. It was fortunate in a way, because Tiny was falling asleep, suffering from road rapture. For miles, the things beyond his windshield—cars, bridges, culverts, farms, fences, mile markers—had been fusing into the image of a face. The stillness scared him. It meant his eyes were no longer seeing the movement of objects. It meant he was asleep.

He tried several ways to keep awake. He rolled down the window, smoked, and left the interstate, hoping that ditches, crossings, and two-way traffic would force him to be alert. But the state highway was empty, and the face came back. He tried to sing with the radio, but could not remember the words. Then the radio faded out. Tiny turned on the overhead light, and the car went into a stall. The problem was electrical.

Soon the Parisienne rolled to a stop, its alternator belt broken and gone. Tiny pulled the battery and began to walk. When a car came by, which was not often, he would turn and put out his thumb. He carried the battery under his arm and was reminded of happy times walking to school with a lunchbox, or taking the lunchboxes of other children. He looked at cattle, who looked at him. He mused about the possibility of retrieving a Camaro mounted on a pole to advertise a dealership in a place called Euclid. Nebraska seemed flat and intimate. He found one battered white ballet slipper on the shoulder and turned it over and over in his hands. Eventually an old pickup stopped. It was red, with a camper top, many dents, and decals on the back for the Everglades, the Keys, the Falls, and the Dells.

The driver of the truck was a sunburned, overweight woman named Marie Person. She was in her sixties and drove leaning forward, forearms curved to the wheel, shoulders
gently rolling in a red-and-white-checked shirt. Marie was one of those eccentrics who travel the lonely highways of monotonous states and almost seem to have been hired by the tourism department to enliven the traveler’s experience. These people have certain things in common. Often they hold a patent, or have applied for one but are being blocked by lawyers, or have some other reason to correspond frequently with Washington, D.C. Sometimes the stamped and addressed letters ride beside them, fanned out on the car seat, which is usually a bench and not a bucket. They travel at midday or late at night. They cross desolate stretches for vague and shifting reasons that often have to do with animals. They need a vaccine for Skip the pony or special food for Rufus the cat to get his urine flowing again. They are going to look at a calf in Elko named Dream Weaver or Son of Helen’s Song. They know everyone in the low-roofed diners along the way, but no one seems to know them. This they account for by giving the details of some unpopular stand they have taken that made everyone furious but was after all the right thing to do. Their surnames are not traceable to other surnames you have heard.

Tiny felt comfortable with Marie Person. She was round and pleasant. Grapes rolled on the floor of her truck. Her story was colorful but did not demand much concentration. She had started out as a midwife in the Northwest Territory and had learned to fly.
Look
magazine sent a man to do a story on her, but he broke his leg on the ice and went back, and though she called a number of times, no one else came. Her husband, who’d taught her to fly, crashed his plane and died. Or maybe it was the man from
Look
magazine who died in the plane crash. Tiny wasn’t listening that closely. Anyway,
Marie moved down here and had eleven children with a lawyer named Kenneth Strong. She lowered both visors to show the school pictures of her children. She gave their names but seemed to repeat herself. The pictures were old, the colors no longer right.

“Do you have any children, sir?” she said.

Tiny shook his head. “We went to the doctor a couple years back. It seems my sperm count wasn’t up to par.”

“Ohh,” said Marie. “What will you build your life around?”

“We won’t,” said Tiny. “We’re divorced.”

“I’m sorry,” said Marie Person, patting his hand.

“Talk to the county sheriff,” said Tiny.

“Why?” said Marie.

“She lives with him.”

“That must sting.”

“I can tell you exactly when it fell apart,” said Tiny. “One time I said to her that nine out of ten men become police because they’re afraid they can’t satisfy a woman in the bed. And she goes, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ It was very obvious. So I went out and got half in the bag, and when I came home she was asleep. ‘Wake up,’ I said. ‘We have to talk.’ See, because I wanted to talk to her. She was the one that didn’t want to talk. I wanted to talk. So anyway, I gave a pull on the bedclothes, and evidently I was kind of worked up, because she fell out of bed. That I regret; that wasn’t fair.”

“No lady likes a violent man,” said Marie.

She bought Tiny lunch at the Stuckey’s outside Lesoka, Colorado. She handed him a napkin and said, “Here’s your napkin.” Afterward, she brought out a pack of Winstons.

“You want a child, here’s what you do,” she said. “Take two tomato plants to the Catholic church and sprinkle them with
holy water. Then plant them somewhere with rain and lots of sunshine. When one tomato has ripened from each plant, take both tomatoes to the one you love as a gift.”

“I don’t believe in that stuff,” said Tiny.

Marie shrugged. “Yeah, it is kind of stupid. I’m going to the ladies’ room.”

Tiny finished his meal and had a cigarette. Then he had another cigarette. He savored the smoke, for there was no hurry. Marie was gone. He had seen her truck leaving. He wished that he had kept his battery with him.

Tiny walked on into Lesoka, which rhymes with Jessica, and took a room in a threadbare hotel near the railroad tracks. There was a candy machine in the lobby, featuring dusty and discontinued brands of licorice. Tiny lay down on a narrow bed with a thin white bedspread. He could not sleep. A train went by. Tiny counted the silhouettes of cats on Chessie boxcars. He turned the dial of the bedside radio until he found his friend Father Zene Hebert. The father was explaining that people will be allowed to bring clothing to Heaven. “The verse should read, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions, each with a cabinet for thy garments.’” Tiny shut off the radio. He took a bath and went down to the street.

That evening he visited all the bars on Railroad Street in Lesoka—the Alley, the Lion’s Tooth, the Golden Spike, Kato’s Korner. He drank shots of Scotch whiskey until his eyes glowed, until his knees buckled, until his features blurred in the mirror. He stumbled from one bar to the next, pissing in doorways and on the Yosemite Sam mudflaps of a Silverado pickup. He got the impression that no one in Lesoka danced, and hauled likely couples before jukeboxes and forcibly
manipulated their arms and legs to the songs of Suzanne Vega, Sly and the Family Stone, Carole King. His mighty finger crushed the buttons of his selections. He sprained the arm of a man named Jim. In turn, he was thrown into the alley behind the Alley.

There he talked to two criminals, or two kids claiming to be criminals, one car thief and one arsonist. Tiny told them about June and about Louise. The car thief thought he should just appear at June’s and take his chances. He said June and her husband would be open to unexpected visitors because Colorado is an informal place where people like to party. The arsonist shook his head and said if it was him, he would play it safe and call ahead. This made sense to Tiny, but when he tried to use the telephone, the operator could not understand him, and said, in a musical and sympathetic voice, “Call it a night, sweetie. Go on home.”

He walked the railroad tracks back to the hotel. Teenagers huddled around a burning barrel near an underpass. They looked at him with what might have been wonder. The encounter seemed to require some transaction or gesture. In his coat pocket Tiny found a piece of wood. He went to the barrel and dropped the wood into the flames. “Thanks, brother,” said the teenagers. Tiny nodded solemnly, but something bothered him about the stick he had contributed to the fire. He did not realize until he was on the third floor of the hotel that it had been attached to his room key. He kicked in the door, fell face down on the bed, and said, “Thank you God for love so deep; look out for me while I’m asleep.” And then he slept.

DAN AND LOUISE shuttled back and forth for a while, staying first at the trailer and then at the farm. But with all their running around, they didn’t see much of each other, and their razors were never where they needed them to be. So they talked this over and Dan moved to the farm, selling his house trailer to the farmer Jan Johanson for nineteen hundred dollars.

The trailer marked the point at which Grafton gave way to fields, and Jan decided to clear and plow the lot. He owned all the surrounding land, so this made sense. The trailer he would move to his farm and use as an agribusiness office. Many farms had now developed to the point where they needed such places, with computers and fax machines and file cabinets that would have struck the farmers of yesteryear as a big waste of material. In any case, moving a trailer required a crane and a flatbed truck, and a number of people showed up out of mild curiosity on the Saturday this was to happen.

Snow fell lightly, disappearing as it touched, leaving no accumulation on the hard black dirt of the fields. The air was cold and still. Louise and Dan sat with Henry Hamilton on the tailgate of Henry’s pickup. Henry was smoking a pipe that kept going out.

Most of the work was done. The Johanson family worked with utmost efficiency. The trailer was off its foundation with two girders underneath, one at each end. Cables connected the girders to the hook of the crane, which was being operated by Hans Cook. The engine was running and sending up smoke from time to time. Up in the cab Hans was drinking coffee.

Later, Henry would claim to have predicted that something would go wrong, which was true, but what he predicted to go wrong and what in fact went wrong were two separate things.

“What do you think’ll happen when they lift that mobile home?” he said.

“The earth will open up and swallow the town,” guessed Louise. She wore a red quilted vest and a Cargill cap.

“I’ll bet you fifty bucks the thing breaks in the middle,” said Henry.

“Tell Jan,” said Dan.

Henry went over and raised this issue with Jan, who listened carefully and then said he had talked to the company that had manufactured the trailer about the best way of moving it. Actually, he said, the company was defunct, but he had tracked down its former engineer, who was now retired and living in California and very willing to discuss the problem. Coming from Jan Johanson, this detective work was totally believable.

“He talked to somebody in California,” said Henry to Louise and Dan.

Hans Cook took a last sip of coffee, tossed what was left on the ground, screwed the cup onto his thermos, put the thermos by his feet, and took hold of the levers that controlled the crane. Jan raised his hand. Hans revved the crane’s engine, and the sound and stream of exhaust sent a current of excitement through the crowd. The crane roared and the cables tightened
until the trailer lifted, but then one of the girder clamps broke and the girder dropped, ringing like a church bell against the cinder-block foundation. The trailer rolled crunching and shattering on the ground. All this happened at once and so smoothly that an uninformed bystander might have thought that this was what they wanted. Fortunately no one was hurt. Jan Johanson had his arms folded the whole time, and when the trailer had come to a stop he still had his arms folded, and he said, “Mother… fuck.”

A crow coasted onto the field and the snow fell.

“I am not believing that,” said Louise.

“I guess that’s how they do it in California,” said Henry.

Hans, in the window of the crane, shook his head and poured coffee. Louise pulled Dan’s hip to hers. “We had some beautiful times in there,” she said.

They lived together all winter, and in the spring announced their engagement. People wondered what Louise saw in someone like Dan. Of course, Dan had his merits. He might not have been a great crime fighter, but he conducted himself decently in most situations, which is not true of every cop. He had gray eyes and a melancholy smile. He was tall enough to be a little taller than she was. The question had more to do with Louise, who had developed a certain status apart from the town and its business. She had always said what she was thinking, and seemed to be afraid of no one, except perhaps Mary. The reason she had married Tiny was that most people thought it was a bad idea. So had she tired of that contrary life? Had she changed? Did she want to drive the patrol car? One phrase came to explain Louise’s decision. Nurse Barbara Jones said it to the hairdresser Lindsey Coale. “She’s come into herself,” said Barbara. “Just look at her face. I was looking at
her face the other day when she didn’t know I was watching. She has come into herself at last.”

“Her hair’s improved, too,” said Lindsey Coale. “It’s got all those reddish highlights. I wish she would stop by. A cut, a curl. Anything. People don’t understand how dependent hair is on the emotions.”

Louise put on a blue dress with white dots and went to see Pastor Boren Matthews of the Trinity Baptist Church. Grafton seemed to get two kinds of religious leaders: simple, good men who understood not one thing about the town, and moody ones who embodied rather than allayed the anxieties of the congregation. Pastor Boren Matthews was of the second category. He and Louise climbed the stairs to the cupola to talk. A .410 shotgun leaned against the wall in a corner.

“We’ve been having trouble with pigeons,” he said. “They live in the bell tower of Sacred Heart and come over here to do their business. I’ve spoken with Father Wall, but he is no help. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Catholicism, Louise. But there are people in this town who are doing some very strange things.”

“All religions are strange,” said Louise.

“But the Catholics take the prize.”

“It’s like having an imaginary friend.”

“You don’t have to think of God in human terms,” said Boren Matthews. “Some people are comfortable with the general idea of a higher power.”

“But that’s like giving up. A higher power could be anything. It could be a big paperweight.”

“A paperweight is not a higher power.”

“I like when they say God is a jealous God. Because you
can imagine him storming around Heaven going, ‘All right, where were you last night?’”

“Quite an imagination. What brings you here?”

“Dan Norman and I are getting married, and I promised my mother to ask if we can have the wedding in your church.”

“It would be difficult for someone who describes God as possibly a paperweight.”

“Well, I gave it a shot.”

“And there was a time not that long ago when I would just say forget it. But churchgoing is not what it used to be, and frankly, we can’t afford to turn anyone away. Do you know how many people we had last Sunday?”

“No.”

“Take a wild guess.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, guess.”

“Fifteen.”

“Six.”

“Including you?”

“No. With me it would be seven.”

“It’s not many.”

He shook his head, looked out the window. “I’m afraid the Trinity Baptist Church of Grafton will not be around much longer. Look what happened in Pinville. Look what happened in Lunenberg. What they’ll do is lump us in with that crowd over in Chesley. And they don’t allow gambling or dancing in Chesley. We’re very liberal here. We take a laissez-faire attitude all the way. When people get to Chesley they’ll be in for a rude awakening.”

“Will you still be around in May?”

“Oh, probably.”

“Because we were thinking about May.”

Pastor Matthews jumped up and crept to the window. “Shh,” he said. He picked up the shotgun. A pigeon flew from the roof. “Come back here,” he said. “Look, May is fine.”

“O.K., great,” said Louise.

The minister shook her hand. “Congratulations, Louise,” he said. “I must say I’ve always been attracted to you, mentally and physically.”

Then she had to go downstairs and ask the minister’s wife, Farina, for a book of ceremonies. Farina was friendly. Her hair was dark, with little waves like those in an unbraided rope. She often sat alone on the steps of the parsonage in the evening. Now she went around the house looking for the book. She could not find it anywhere. She did find an old photograph. In it a young woman smiled, her legs folded on summer grass. She had lipstick and sideswept hair.

“Do you believe that’s me?” she said.

“Sure.”

“That’s on Rainy Lake, Minnesota. My family used to go every summer.”

Louise left the parsonage and thumbed through the small notebook she had taken to carrying to keep her errands straight. Then she drove up to Stone City and met Dan at Mercy Hospital to have their blood drawn for the marriage license. They sat in plastic chairs with fold-down palettes for their arms. A nurse they did not know came in and wrapped tubing around their arms. Louise had seen junkies apply this same kind of tourniquet on PBS. The intercom said something and the nurse left.

“Boren Matthews came on to me,” said Louise.

“What do you mean, ‘came on’?”

“He said he was attracted to me.”

“Maybe he meant he likes you.”

“He said mentally and physically attracted.”

“That does sound like coming on.”

“I guess he doesn’t have any congregation left and it’s driving him crazy.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?”

“Nah. You know, my arm’s beginning to hurt. I don’t think you’re supposed to leave a tourniquet on if you’re not bleeding. Where did she go?”

They removed the bands. The lights throbbed in their eyes. “It’s this dress,” said Dan. “When you wear this dress the most sacred man would be attracted to you.”

“I thought you were the most sacred man.”

“It’s just a sexy dress.”

“This?”

“Yeah.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“I guess that’s why,” said Dan.

The nurse came and drew their blood. It was kind of painful. Louise imagined that the doctors would mix their blood together in the lab and hope for the best. Then they went into the waiting room, where Dan stood at the counter filling out forms while Louise wrote in her notebook.

“What were you just writing?” he said as they walked out, and she handed him a piece of paper on which she had written “Show Me Love” four times.

“I will,” he said.

Dan went back to work, and Louise drove to the mall south of Stone City. She bought a pair of pale yellow shoes to get married in. They hurt her feet.

“You want that,” said the salesman. “If the shoe didn’t feel
painful now, it would probably be the wrong size. You could go to a seven. But, Miss, I guarantee you this foot of yours would swim in a seven.”

Louise paid for the shoes and left. She followed a mother and daughter out of the store and through the mall. The girl, about two years old and carrying a shoebox, was drawn like a magnet to anything that would break or fall. The mother kept dragging her away from the storefronts. There was a stone fountain in the center of the mall, and here the two rested. The mother read a newspaper while the girl opened the shoebox, took out a new pair of red shoes, and threw them in the water.

Now, at this same time gamblers had set up shop in Grafton. These were two men who drove a dark red Chevrolet Impala and sat all day in the back of the Lime Bucket tavern. They claimed to be from Canada, but their knowledge of Canada was sketchy. Dan knew something about the gamblers but had not yet taken action. It seemed to Louise that many things fell into this category for Dan. A good part of the job of sheriff, the way he did it, was the biding of time.

One day Louise overheard one of the gamblers talking on the phone. There was a pay phone in the Lime Bucket, but these two men generally walked across Main Street to the phone booth by the old bank. This was not what you would call private—the door had been removed years ago to discourage kids from going in there at night and kissing—but it was better than standing by the jukebox with “Third Rate Romance” playing in your ear.

“The angel will bite if it gets aggressive,” the gambler was saying. “Sure it will… I did tell you that, honey. You’ve got to separate them… Yes, I’ll hold on, but I want you to go right
now and separate those fish… How about in the tank with the mollies… What do you mean? All of them?… Well, what exactly killed them, honey? I am not, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just wish you wouldn’t sound so happy when my fish die… Listen, while I’m holding, why don’t you put Klaus on… Hi, Klaus. It’s Daddy. It’s your old man, Klaus… Do you hear me? Are you there? I hear you breathing… Klaus? Hello?”

The gambler left the booth. He dressed with style for someone living out of a Chevrolet Impala. He wore black pants, an ironed blue shirt, and a New York Mets cap turned backward over his ponytail. No one seemed to know his name, but he was called Larry Longhair.

“You’re getting married,” he said to Louise. “I saw your picture in the paper. I went to get you a present, but the store was closed. Good for you, in any case. Marriage is one of the reasons we play this silly game. Here, have ten dollars.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Louise.

“Oh, take it,” he said.

“You’ll need it for gambling,” said Louise. “You and that other guy.”

“Richie,” said the gambler.

“You can’t get away with it forever.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said the gambler. “But in the meantime, I know of a good bet in the ninth race at Ak-Sar-Ben. If I call right now, we can get you in on it. I’ll put in this ten, and you put in twenty. Total wager: thirty bucks.”

“Some present,” said Louise.

One evening between then and the wedding, Louise came home from work to find sawdust settled like snow on the floor
of the bedroom. Dan had dug an ancient string bed out of the attic and lengthened it by cutting and installing new four-by-four side rails. Then he ran six planks from rail to rail, spacing them evenly from the head of the bed to the foot, and bolted plywood to the planks. The mattress rested on the plywood, and the resulting bed was rustic, fragrant, and very high. Louise and Dan got on their backs and slid underneath—it was like being in the basement of a new house, peering up at the joists.